


Noodles and Company

by Jazzy_Kandra



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson, SANDERSON Brandon - Works, The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: F/M, Spoilers for Bands of Mourning and Secret History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 18:06:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12989586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jazzy_Kandra/pseuds/Jazzy_Kandra
Summary: After a long stay in South Scadrial, Marsh returns home to find a bowl of warm noodles, a purring cat, and some unwanted company.Part of the Mistshot series.





	Noodles and Company

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eyeronis](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Eyeronis).



Generally speaking, Marsh was happy these days.

He had a flat in the midst of downtown Elendel, a new bottle of wine, and would soon have peace and quiet after months of spending too much time around too many people far younger than him. Yes, Sazed had asked him to go to the South and the work he had done down there - studying their cultures, their technology, and their ongoing struggles with those they referred to as the Maskless barbarians - was important, he was relief to return to his apartment and take a well-deserved break.

Marsh smiled, slipping the key into the lock. Unlike what the stories said, he did not always have two spikes or a bald head. Vin had removed the spike in his right eye, and while he hadn’t been able to heal that injury completely, he’d gotten his eye back. (1) His hair, still blond, fell past his ears, longer than Marsh preferred. He’d have to get that cut. Hopefully Harmony wouldn’t need old Ironeyes to appear anytime soon, it always seemed to take it’s godsdamn to grow back.

He was  _Marsh_ , not Ironeyes, no matter what Northerners believed. With a hump, and final jiggle of his key into the damn old lock, he finally unlocked the door and stepped into his flat, but stood in the small foyer in shock.

The lights were on. There was no dust on the wooden furniture, picture frames, or bookshelves. The floor-to-ceiling windows were not only clean but had the maroon curtains drawn back. Someone had removed the white sheets from his leather furniture which was slightly scratched up. And there was a new glass vase filled with fresh Marewill blossoms resting on the dining table.

Why did  _he_  have to be here today of all days? A steam of curses alighted from Marsh’s lips.

“Are you done?” asked his unwanted guess. Marsh burned bronze. He was in the kitchen, it seemed. All he could sense was his Investiture through the thin wall.

“Rust and Ruin,” he said, still seething with anger. “What in Hell are you doing here?”

Kelsier’s head poked out of the half-open kitchen door. Long blond held back in a loose ponytail, face clean shaven (at least he had gotten rid of that stupid facial hair), and his face seemed to have a few more lines edged into it. That last detail was probably just his imagination. Cognitive Shadows weren’s supposed to age, right? A part of their Identity still viewed themselves as dead, even when they were in physical form. (2)

Still, Marsh grimaced at the sight. Kelsier wasn’t pretending to be the Lord Ruler these days, why did he still insist on keeping his hair so long? It was improper! Did that  _woman_ like it? He would never understand her sense of taste.

“That’s a secret,” Kelsier said. Marsh flattened his lips into a frown. “At least for the next few minutes it is.”

Kelsier slipped back into the kitchen, closing the door. What was that smell? Was Kelsier  _cooking_?

Marsh sighed, slumping down onto his brown leather couch. It was just his luck that his brother had come to visit  _right_  when he got back. The man wasn’t  _quite_  as bad as he once had been in some respects, but he was just as annoying in others, some of them new. If he didn’t know better, he’d think Kelsier was tapping Fortune just so he could show up at the best times to annoy Marsh for the rest of eternity.

At least, that’s how he thought Fortune worked. It wasn’t a power he had access to though, despite all his spikes.

“Your noodles are served,” Kelsier said, dramatically handing him a bowl of strange, curly noodles with even  _stranger_  looking vegetables and bits of mystery meat in the broth. Marsh scowled in disgust. What in the cosmere had Kelsier brought him this time? “Oh don’t give me that look, it’s perfectly edible.”

“Edible doesn’t mean they’re something a man should  _want_ to eat.” Marsh grimaced, staring at the bowl on his lap.

Kelsier took the only wooden chair in this part of the great room, sitting on it backwards out of habit. He dove into his bowl of noodles with the kind of reckless abandon that only a Cognitive Shadow who did not have to worry about what he ate.

“Kelsier,” he said, “that’s disgusting.”

The man looked up, a mouthful of noodles hanging from his mouth.

“What would our mother say?”

Kelsier just snorted, finishing that mouthful before he spoke. “Eat your noodles, Marsh,” he said in a slightly higher pitched nasally voice. “You never know when we’ll get our next meal.”

Marsh rolled his eye. They’d actually never been without food as children. Neither of them had really understood what it meant to starve - even a little - until they were adults. “Coppermind?”

He nodded, holding up a small diamond ring made of copper that was a replica of one their mother had once worn. Sentimental bastard. “Eat your noodles, brother, and I’ll tell you why I decided to bother you when you just got back.”

 _How does he know that!_  Marsh thought, miffed.

 _I may have let it slip, I think._ Sazed, it seemed, was paying some attention to this conversation.  _Do not worry, Marsh. There is a low likelihood that those noodles will upset your stomach, and an even lower chance that they will kill you._

Wonderful. Just the kind of answers he wanted.

_Do the damn things taste good at least?_

_I’m afraid I cannot answer that._

He should’ve expected this. Shards didn’t exactly need nourishment, and while Harmony doubtlessly knew the likely outcome of these events, it wasn’t like him to share said information.

Especially when both he and Kelsier were in on some grand joke.

“Speaking with Saze?” Kelsier asked. “They won’t taste good at all if they get cold.”

Marsh grunted. Then sighed. That was something their mother had said too. He might as well get this over with. Wearily, he twirled the noodles around his fork, then slowly took a bite. They were spicy, but not as hot as Terris noodles, and surprisingly favorable. He swallowed, still shocked that he actually  _liked_  something from another planet.

“What’s wrong?” Kelsier said, looking concern. “Oh dammit. This isn’t the future where you choke to death, is it?”

He flipped Kelsier a rude gesture. “They’re…actually good,” he admitted, taking another bite. “Damn you.”

Kelsier laughed. Harmony joined him in his merriment. Why did he have such poor choices in friends?

“And him.” He did not speak again until he finished the rest, and emptied a glass of wine that Kelsier had wordlessly poured at some point, a twinkle of amusement still alive in his brother’s eye. “Now, why in  _hell_  are you here?”

“To win a bet!” he said with all too much cheer.

“A bet about what?” he asked, though he feared he already knew the answer. “Dear Harmony, you ruined my peaceful day for some bet you made with that damned Nazh-person, didn’t you?”

He nodded with a show of faux sincerity. “Sorry,” he said. “If it makes you feel better, I brought you a new cat.”

Marsh gave him a dry look. He didn’t hate cats, but he wasn’t particularly fond of the creatures, either. They scratched up your nice leather furniture and got white fur all over your nice black cloak. That was, of course, when said cat decided to come out of nowhere and jump on his lap, kneading his legs. Soon, it curled up and fell asleep, purring loudly near his knees, almost out of reach.

“I  _prefer_ dogs.” Marsh stroked the cat’s long fur despite his words. At least it wasn’t white this time, just some dark shade of grey with bright green eyes. It was…admittedly rather adorable. Dammit.

“She’ll lick your hand given the opportunity,” Kelsier said.

He stared at him in reply. Of course his brother thought that would fix the problem, but he supposed it was a fair compromise. After all, Marsh’s landlady did not allow dogs in her building. Thus, this cat was the closest thing he would get.

It was thoughtful…in a Kelsier-like way.

“Plus, Vin seems to like you.”

“You named a cat after Vin…?” he said in mild disbelief. “Kelsier.”

“She was catlike.”

He lifted a hand to his cover his eye spike. “I know you miss her, but this is  _insane_.”

“That’s what makes you question my sanity these days?” Kelsier raised an eyebrow. “Not going to Taldain to steal the technology and recipe for making instant noodles?”

What.

“Nor pissing off a goddess for stealing said recipe?”

The.

“Or bringing back the god Trell because I pissed her off?”

Hell.

Marsh stared at him in the kind of loud silence only his brother could produce. He thought he’d seen the limits of Kelsier’s stupidity when he got himself killed to bring about the end of the Final Empire. At least that time he had a good  _reason_  for his actions. This though…this…Marsh nearly stood up and decked him. Harmony knew Kelsier deserved it.

“Marsh?”

Marsh blinked.

“You’re telling me,” he began once he regained some semblance of composure, “that the reason the Set is working for a foreign god is because you  _pissed_  off another Vessel all for the sake of a bowl of instant noodles.”

“Several bowls. If we don’t control the market on convenient foods, it will jeopardize our Cognitive Realm-based economy!”

Marsh glared. “Brother.”

“Yes?”

“Last I recall, you went to Taldain to help  _Khriss_  visit her homeland,” he said. Or at least that had been part of the plan. Marsh wasn’t aware of all the details. Usually tales of his brother’s adventures in the greater cosmsere gave him a headache…and he already had one. “ _Not noodles_.”

Kelsier shrugged. “They are  _good_  noodles,” he said, then he added as though in afterthought: “Fine. I think she was angered that a servant of Harmony had the guts to ‘interfere’ with her Autonomy.”

Marsh nodded. He, for one, wouldn’t call Kelsier a  _servant_  of Harmony. Maybe an ally of some type, but his brother had his own agenda, though both were trying to make sure Scadrial ‘survived’ what was coming. Whatever the Hell that meant.

“Go on…,” he said.

“And that we were able to hide from her for so long by storing the correct attributes in medallions,” he said, then waved a dismissive hand at that. “But that’s a long story, we can speak of it later. Harmony wants us to speak with that idiot Ladrian boy and his friend, Marasi. You’ll need to shave your head, I fear.”

He said that with a slight smirk. Kelsier  _knew_  how much Marsh hated doing so. The thought filled him with dread, but he would not let his brother ‘help’ him this time. Marsh stroked his new cat for comfort.

“We’ve got reports from our spies that the Set has found a way to produce Atium,” he said. “They can’t burn it, of course, unless they have a Mistborn we don’t know of. But you know why it’s something to be feared: with that metal, they can use it to steal any power or attribute…” (2)

Marsh sighed, pouring himself another glass of wine. Damn. This was going to be one hell of a long day.

***  
A/N: All WoBs in Footnotes are shortened/linked for brevity. This is a story, not theorycraft.

(1) Based on this [WoB](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwob.coppermind.net%2Fevents%2F87-white-sand-vol1-release-party%2F%23e5660&t=YmQyNDFlMzg5NDIxMGMwOTI3Y2FlZTRiYjIzNjExZTU3NGE4YWY2YyxmMVI3QVFEbQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AUF81NKxGgaWitZXaCmlB1A&p=http%3A%2F%2Fjazzy-kandra.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168443880773%2Fnoodles-and-company&m=1):

 

> “Brandon Sanderson: Or really I can tell you–it’s in my notes, and I don’t have them, but it’s not particularly relevant–it’s the opposite side of the one where Death’s skull was crushed.  
>    
>  Questioner: Oh, yes. Yes.  
>    
>  Brandon Sanderson: They would look like mirror images if you saw them.”

(2) To keep spoilers at bay for a certain book, I will not be delving into an explanation on this one. Marsh, however,  _doesn’t_  have the best understanding of Investiture, Identity, and other such concepts. He’s certainly cosmere aware, but he’s also no arcanist.

(3) And you THOUGHT Atium wasn’t useful in modern Scadrial. It is for Hemalurgy at least, and an organization like the Set would find it very useful indeed. Based on this [WoB](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwob.coppermind.net%2Fevents%2F202-barnes-and-noble-book-club-qa%2F%23e5971&t=ODAyZjc2OTM1ZTExYjQwZmQ2ZDhlMWNhMjIwYTI2MTM0ODJhOGZiNyxmMVI3QVFEbQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AUF81NKxGgaWitZXaCmlB1A&p=http%3A%2F%2Fjazzy-kandra.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F168443880773%2Fnoodles-and-company&m=1) about atium’s actual Hemalurgic uses.


End file.
